Humanists encourage discussion and the use of evidence and reason, not dogma, in solving problems. This means that humanists do not necessarily agree on everything. Articles on this web site and speakers at meetings do not necessarily represent anyone else's opinion.

The Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists (RCOG) has voted strongly in favour of taking abortion out of criminal law right across the UK. Currently, under an 1861 law, if women have an abortion outside of circumstances that are legally permitted, they can face up to life imprisonment. In Britain, this means failing to comply […]

In a statement at the 36th session of the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, Humanists UK has joined various states in expressing concern at the growing marginalisation of religious, non-religious, and LGBT minorities in Indonesia. Despite having long accommodated a variety of different religion and belief communities, atheists are not legally recognised in […]

The leader of Lancashire County Council Geoff Driver has submitted a proposal to ban halal meat that has not been pre-stunned before slaughter from being served in the county’s schools, after it has been revealed that twenty-seven schools with a total of 12,000 pupils across the county are serving all pupils meat from suppliers where […]

Humanists UK has criticised the UK Government’s plans to end limits on religious discrimination in state school admissions during a speech at the 36th session of the UN Human Rights Council (UNHRC) in Geneva. The statement was made during a debate on the UNHRC’s universal periodic review of the UK, which took place in May […]

In a landmark ruling in the Court of Protection, life-prolonging care can be withdrawn from patients who are minimally conscious or in a permanent vegetative state if both the doctors and family agree that it is in their best interests, without the intervention of a court being required. Humanists UK welcomes this decision, which places […]

With the news replete with stories of humanists and freethinkers killed and persecuted for ‘blasphemy’ around the world, Alex Sinclair-Lack asks ‘How candid can I be about my beliefs’? All humanists must grapple with the question of when it is appropriate to tell people that you don’t believe in their god, and when, if ever, […]

Last week, the Archbishop of York criticised the National Trust and Cadbury for dropping the word ‘Easter’ from the name of their annual egg hunt. This prompted Prime Minister Theresa May to take time out of her visit to the Middle East to state: ‘I think the stance they have taken is absolutely ridiculous.’ Here […]

Heroes are not the stuff of myth: they keep us safe each and every day It’s normal when confronted by horrific events someplace in the world to feel a mixture of emotions. Grief, for the victims whose stories you have read about in the papers. Anger, for the fact that such a tragedy could be […]

Young Humanists is the section of the BHA specifically for humanists aged 18-35. It runs a regular Twitter debate once a month using the hashtag #YHDebate. March’s debate took the form of an ‘ask me anything’ (AMA) with Imtiaz Shams, a BHA trustee who is also the co-founder of Faith to Faithless, which provides support and […]

As a charity that operates within the field of religion and belief, the BHA’s work on education issues tends to be associated most with its campaigning on ‘faith’ schools and against the various freedoms to discriminate along religious lines that they enjoy. What we are less well-known for, perhaps, is our decades of campaigning around […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Dearest Internet. I have found that the maxim “you just can’t win” holds up remarkably well. It turns out that by merely pointing out the fact that some person holds some opinion about some thing, one has therefore implicitly endorsed that opinion—on b […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. As a short, awkward, nerdy aspie with no interest in sports, there have been few American institutions that I feel more alienated by than the National Football League. The grandiose NFL logo and the iconography of its franchises have always been, to me […]

I recently acquired an old sarsaparilla bottle, its label stating that it was intended for medical treatment of such diseases as “chronic rheumatism,” “obstinate cutaneous eruptions,” and “syphilitic conditions.” It was to be used orally, not topically. Yes, this is the same sarsaparilla long used as an herbal tea and tonic that evolved into a health drink b […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. It’s safe to go to Brigham Young University now. They’re letting in Coke and Pepsi. At Wired, Michelle Dean has a big story on what is a surprising degree of drama and stress (financial, personal, political, etc.) behind the scenes at Snopes. In this s […]

As of this writing, Hurricane Maria continues to pound the Caribbean (and Puerto Rico specifically). As The New York Times reported, “Daybreak in Puerto Rico on Thursday exposed the crushing devastation wrought by Hurricane Maria - splintered homes, crumbled balconies, uprooted trees and floodwaters coursing through streets. The storm cut a path through the […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Our boss, Robyn Blumner, is in Geneva for the 36th session of the UN Human Rights Council, and yesterday she delivered an excellent statement on the persecution of atheists in Malaysia. (Don’t let yourself be distracted by the incredibly orange and fea […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. The Earth continues to writhe. More than 200 people are killed in the devastation of a 7.1-magnitude earthquake across central Mexico. Joshua Partlow at the Washington Post reports: Marisela Avila Gomez, 58, was in her apartment in the capital’s cent […]

You may have heard the news—or at least the joke: there were more clowns than usual in the nation’s capital over the weekend. As Newsweek reported, “Among the thousands of protesters who took to the streets of Washington DC Saturday, some certainly did not look like your average demonstrators. Dressed in creepy clown garb and some sporting punk haircuts, app […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Check out this fascinating presentation on the Gnostic gospels, given by the wicked-smart Cynthia Grzywinski, who also happens to be my mom. (And introduced with a poem read by my college acting professor, the wicked-awesome Pam Hendrick.) Neil deGrass […]

The Morning Heresy is your daily digest of news and links relevant to the secular and skeptic communities. Kimberly Winston, reporting on an Annenberg study, writes an excellent and accurate lede for some ugly news. Emphasis mine: Nearly 1 in 5 Americans incorrectly believe that Muslim citizens don’t have the same First Amendment rights as other American ci […]

Someone called Nigel Hasilow wrote an article entitled “Freak Midwinter’ published in the Shrewsbury Chronicle on 31 December, dismissing the idea of human-caused climate change.

I don’t know who Nigel Hasilow is, but the name may be a misprint for Nigel Hastilow, who according to Wikipedia is a journalist, author, businessman and politician, and former editor of the Birmingham Post newspaper. If so, he appears to be a regular contributor to the Express and Star group newspapers and it’s likely the article has appeared in other papers in the group. But he doesn’t look like the sort of person you’d go to for information about the climate.

Mr Hastilow’s article includes a great deal of political comment on the recent Paris conference, but it also includes claims about the science. The main theme of the article depends very much on a logical error called ‘non-sequitur’: that is, because the climate has changed in the past before humans were around or had enough technology to affect it, therefore we can disregard the possibility of humans affecting the climate now.

Suppose that the police discover a murder victim – would he then argue that it can’t be a murder, because millions of people have died natural deaths? No, of course not, because the police will collect forensic evidence that shows that it is a murder, not a natural death.

In a similar way, thousands of climate scientists have collected the evidence and published it in many thousands of scientific papers and shown that our current climate change is largely not natural. These scientists have collected evidence of all kinds – from measurements of temperatures past and present, carbon dioxide concentrations, the history of ancient rocks, the oceans, glaciers and many other sources – together with basic physics, and shown that the only reasonable explanation for our current climate change is that it is largely caused by the fossil carbon we are pumping at a high rate into the atmosphere and oceans. It is worth noting, too, that the only reason Mr Hastilow knows that climate has changed in the past comes from this research by climate scientists – the very research and climate scientists that Mr Hastilow believes are mistaken about human influence on the climate!

We know that we have drastically changed the atmosphere of the planet in a very short time: from around 280 parts per million of carbon dioxide before the Industrial Revolution to over 400 parts per million now – and currently increasing at over 2 ppm per year from the fossil fuels we use. We also know, from very well-established physics, that this extra concentration significantly increases the amount of the sun’s heat that is not radiated out to space, rather as putting on extra layers of clothing keeps you from losing heat on a cold day.

This is not the only error in Mr Hastilow’s article. He confuses climate and weather (a common but serious mistake) and then confuses climate researchers with weather forecasters (although who he thinks “they” are who allegedly forecast the “coldest winter for 50 years” is not stated – it appears to be the Daily Express which says the same thing every year! Certainly not the Met Office.)

It looks as if Mr Hastilow really does not know enough about climate science to write an article on it. But that is not unusual. I’ve been following the self-described “climate change sceptics” for around 8 years now, and the one thing that almost all “climate change sceptics” have in common is that they avoid the science. Almost completely.

On the one hand we have climate scientists, who do scientific research. On the other hand we have the “sceptics”, who lobby through politics and the media, to influence politicians and the public. Put any of the latest news on climate change into Google, and you will find tens or hundreds of websites putting the “sceptic” case for every one that explains the science. But look more closely and you will find that most of these are just repeating each other. Delve a bit deeper and you will find a large number of organisations, like the GWPF in this country, dedicated to promoting the “sceptic” position (who funds these organisations is usually pretty unclear). But dig again and you will find that the number of people actually involved is quite small. Their names pop up again and again. And few have any climate science experience.

The talking points vary little – and have varied little over the last 10 or 20 years, because the purpose of the “sceptics” is to do politics, not science. I call these talking points “zombie memes” because they are not arguments, and although wrong they cannot be killed – “climate sceptics” will never be deterred by pointing out the errors in what they say. These zombie memes look sciency, but they are typically logical errors, factual errors or half-truths intended to mislead (like the Thames freezing over). If you encounter these memes, a good source of information is the Skeptical Science web site, which currently lists 176 of these (it calls them “myths”).

Like this:

From the conference organised by Center for Inquiry UK and the British Humanist Association: Global Warming — Where Do We Go From Here? Philosopher and Green activist Dr Rupert Read speaking on global over-heat, the end of denialism, and the self-destruction of libertarianism in relation to this issue – and a possible way forward, in terms of guardians for future people.

From the conference organised by Center for Inquiry UK and the British Humanist Association: Global Warming — Where Do We Go From Here? by Dr Mayer Hillman, Senior Fellow Emeritus, Policy Studies Institute, London. What do we do now that society is demonstrating all too clearly its strong preference for downplaying the significance and implications of climate change?

Member Richard Burnham will give a talk on Sceptics, deniers, believers and scientists – and climate change

He will talk about different understandings of the problem of man-made global warming (and other scientific questions). Is there a difference between a climatologist and an environmentalist, or between a ‘denier’ and a ‘sceptic’? What is a consensus? Do you ‘believe’ in science? He won’t be going into technical detail about global warming.

In the Hobbs Room at Shrewsbury Library (just inside the front entrance) on Tuesday July 13th at 7.30 pm.

Looking beyond that, Shropshire Humanist Group member Richard Burnham will give a talk on Sceptics, deniers, believers and scientists – and climate change in the Hobbs Room at Shrewsbury Library on Tuesday July 13th.